


The Season's End is a New Beginning

by transdimensional_void



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Historical, F/F, Fem!Phil, First Kiss, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Regency Romance, fem!Dan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 15:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3941761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transdimensional_void/pseuds/transdimensional_void
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lady Daniela and her close friend Philippa take a fateful stroll in the park. (Fem!Dan and Fem!Phil, Regency romance parody AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Season's End is a New Beginning

A single, crystalline tear formed at the corner of Lady Daniela’s lovely eye and trembled on her dark lower lashes for an instant before beginning its brief journey down her smooth, pale cheek.

 

The lady was distraught.

 

Despite being eighteen, beautiful and heiress to a large fortune — and not to mention the possessor of a figure the sight of which had caused many a gentleman to entertain less-than-gentlemanly thoughts — she simply could not be satisfied with her lot in life.

 

“Oh, Daniela, don’t tell me you’re crying _again_ ,” her mother sighed upon catching sight of the glittering tear as it caught the morning sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds. “We shall have callers any minute now, and if you are just going to weep again, I shall have to send you upstairs to your room.”

 

“Very well then,” Lady Daniela murmured, her rose-pink lower lip jutting out just a bit in a somewhat unladylike expression. She stood, smoothing the muslin skirt of her morning dress, and prepared to take herself off to the upper precincts of the the family’s large, London home.

 

“Daniela,” her mother intoned, the tenor of her voice a warning. “If you hide yourself above stairs now, you will stay up there through luncheon to allow you time to reflect on the immaturity of your behavior.”

 

A little of the pink drained from Lady Daniela’s cheek and she paused on her path toward the drawing room door.

 

“N-no luncheon?” Her melodious voice had gone faint, and she was eyeing her mother with a look of great misgiving.

 

“No luncheon,” Lady Howell confirmed.

 

Lady Daniela cast one last, longing look toward the door and then, with a small sigh — the sound of long suffering — she returned to her chair by the window, propping an elbow on a side-table and leaning one cheek upon her hand.

 

“And I won’t have you _brooding_ while our guests are here, either, Miss, or you may as well have gone upstairs after all.”

 

“I never brood,” the young Lady said with a toss of her dusky curls. “I merely possess a contemplative air.”

 

“When receiving guests, a Lady does not turn contemplative either,” her mother reproved, drawing up her lips into a purse.

 

Daniela held in a sigh. Being a Lady was so very boring, not like in the novels she read at all. Ladies in novels always seemed to be getting kidnapped by dashing, young highwaymen or eloping with mysterious gentlemen who had made their fortunes in India. Or at least getting to go on holiday to the seaside at Brighton. But here was Daniela, stuck in London, attending a seemingly endless series of sedate balls and insipid tea parties.

 

Perhaps she had received a few offers of marriage already — after all, as sole heiress of the Howell family’s land and fortunes, potential marriage partners were not in short supply. But all the offers she’d received so far had been from such utterly hopeless people. 

 

Take Sir Barnaby for example. She was sure he was a very kind-hearted and earnest young man, but every time they spoke, he seemed incapable of conversing on any topic but animal husbandry. She was very happy for him that his sheep were such good breeders, but really, couldn’t he speak of anything else? And then there was Lord Irving, who she had to admit was quite capable of lively conversation, but who was also nearly _forty_. So what if he was one of the wealthiest bachelors in all of England? What did a forty-year-old have in common with a teenaged girl like Daniela?

 

She almost scowled at the thought, except that scowling was another thing her mother was wont to send her to her room for doing. And Daniela simply could not risk missing luncheon, not when cook had promised to make her favorite chocolate mousse for dessert.

 

Somewhere down on the ground floor of the house there was a faint knocking sound, and a short minute later, the door opened to admit one of the footmen, announcing their first caller of the morning. Daniela sat up straighter, put on her politest society smile, and prepared to greet their guest.

 

By the time luncheon rolled around, Lady Daniela was convinced that half of London had sat on their drawing room chairs that morning. She was so tired of small talk and constrained laughter that she felt quite ready to pull out her hair in frustration. When the last matronly Lady had taken herself and her sour-faced daughter off, Daniela couldn’t hold in her sigh of relief. She’d survived, and the chocolate mousse was so close she could almost taste it.

 

“See there, Daniela, you _can_ be a most proper young lady if you just apply yourself,” her mother said, rising from the divan where she sat and straightening her skirt with a practiced gesture. She was wearing chartreuse again today, which she thought she looked well in and Daniela didn’t have the heart to tell her made her look like an overcooked asparagus spear.

 

“Of course I can, but I don’t see why I should,” Daniela muttered, rising from her own seat and giving her backside a discreet rub. Having to sit up straight for hours on end was never kind on her derrière. “From what I can see, being a proper young lady is only attractive to a very boring sort of person.”

 

Lady Howell cast her eyes up toward the ceiling and held out her hands in a hopeless gesture.

 

“Heavens preserve us from the philosophy of adolescents,” she cried, and Daniela scowled, knowing that her mother wouldn’t see. “Come along to luncheon, and I advise you not to attempt to join the conversation unless you are sure you can improve it.”

 

As soon as her mother turned toward the drawing room door, Daniela stuck out her tongue at her mother’s retreating back. She wanted to cross her arms over her chest and hunch her shoulders and stamp out of the room as well, but she _was_ eighteen now, and she hated it when her mother accused her of being childish.

 

Cook had outdone herself with the chocolate mousse, and for just a few moments, Daniela let all her other concerns fade away as she sank into the bliss of the melty dessert.

 

After luncheon, she and Mother went up to the sitting room and worked for an hour or so at replying to the correspondence they’d each received in the morning mail. Daniela had a letter from her cousin, who was stuck with their sickly grandmother in Bath for the Season, and she had to be thankful, at least, that that had not been her fate.

 

Daniela’s ears pricked up when she heard the door knocker downstairs again. Morning callers were tedious, but people who called in the afternoon usually came with invitations. Daniela couldn’t exactly be described as a social butterfly, but at least she might be able to get out from under the stern gaze of her mother for a few hours.

 

Moments later, there came the sounds of feet on the stairs, and then the door opened and Higgs, their butler, appeared.

 

“Miss Philippa Lester,” he announced, with a short bow.

 

Daniela tossed aside her pen — spoiling the letter she’d been writing with an ink splatter — and almost leapt to her feet, a grin plastered across her face.

 

“Show her in,” Lady Howell ordered the butler, and Daniela didn’t miss the way her lips turned slightly down. Mother didn’t quite approve of her friendship with Philippa, not that Daniela particularly cared what her mother thought. Still, she caught her lower lip between her teeth for a moment in an unconscious nervous gesture. She hoped Philippa wouldn’t notice Mother’s expression. It would only hurt her feelings.

 

The butler held the door open a little further, and a young woman entered, tall and slender, with a face that was angular but pretty nevertheless. She had great, clear-blue eyes, and soft waves of brown hair with just the faintest hint of russet. When the butler had pulled the door shut behind her, she dropped a polite curtsy toward Lady Howell and murmured a “How do you do?” before hurrying over to Daniela’s side.

 

“May I take a walk in the park with Philippa this afternoon, Mother?” Daniela asked, recognizing the twinkle in her friend’s eye at once as a sign that she had _news_ to share.

 

Lady Howell’s eyes narrowed just the slightest bit, and Daniela knew her mother was trying to think of an excuse. When she inclined her head in a brief nod of assent, though, Daniela couldn’t suppress a smile, and it was revealed that the young lady’s smile, when deep and true, was productive of an adorable dimple in her left cheek.

 

“Thank you, Mother!” she cried, grabbing for Philippa’s gloved hand and dragging her from the room before Lady Howell had time to change her mind. Once they were on the stairs, making their way up to Daniela’s chamber, where she would change into a walking dress and don her bonnet and gloves, Philippa turned to her with a tooth-filled grin and whispered,

 

“You’ll never guess what happened. I cannot _wait_ to tell you all about it.”

 

“Well, stop teasing me and help me change my dress,” Daniela muttered, pulling her friend into her bedroom and shutting the door behind just a little too loudly. By rights, Daniela should call her maid to help her change, but she was in too much of a rush to wait for Bonnie to come up from below stairs, and she knew Philippa wouldn’t mind.

 

Philippa was doing up the buttons on her petticoat — Daniela was under strict orders from her mother never to stir out of doors wearing any fewer than three petticoats — when the Lady heard her friend give a soft sigh.

 

“What is it, Pippa? Is something wrong?” She turned slightly to try to catch sight of her friend’s face, but Philippa’s hand gently pushed her cheek back around again.

 

“I can’t reach the buttons properly when you’re turned around like that,” she explained. “No, nothing’s wrong. It’s just, it must be wonderful to have such a shapely figure.”

 

Daniela was very glad then that the other girl couldn’t see her face anymore, as she was quite sure she was blushing. She couldn’t think why the knowledge that Pippa had been taking notice of her figure should make her blush, but it did.

 

“You have a very nice figure too,” she murmured, keeping her eyes focused on the rug below her walking boots.

 

“Do you really think so? My brother is always telling me it’s too boyish,” Philippa said in a soft voice. Then her hands dropped and she took a step back. “All right. You’re ready for your dress.”

 

While Philippa busied herself lifting Daniela’s dress from where it was draped over the back of a chair, Daniela stole a quick peek around at her friend. She was slender, yes, and her figure lacked the deep curves of Daniela’s body, but Daniela thought that the way the thin muslin of her dress draped gracefully across her back and hung just so from her front made her look like something otherworldly — a fairy, perhaps, or a nymph.

 

“I personally find your figure adorable,” Daniela opined, turning back around before her friend could catch her staring. “Now we’d better hurry and get outside before Mother can think to make us take Bonnie along.”

 

Philippa was back at her side in a trice, and her nimble fingers made quick work of pulling the dress over Daniela’s head and fastening the short row of buttons up the back. Then Daniela decided to top it off with her new wine-colored velvet pelisse and matching straw bonnet, and she felt her ensemble was complete.

 

They made good on their escape then, and once they were past the imposing iron gate that separated their front walk from the public street, Daniela let out a small sigh of relief. She knew it was only for a couple of hours, but she always felt such a heady sense of freedom when she was allowed out from under her Mother’s watchful gaze for any length of time.

 

Turning to Philippa with a smile, she linked her left arm through her friend’s right, and cried,

 

“Now tell me your news!”

“Oh, Danni, it’s just so wonderful! I don’t even know where to start. Well, I shall start at the beginning. I did just as you suggested, and I sent my poems in to the publisher with a false name—“

 

“What name did you choose?” Daniela asked, overtaken by a sudden, strong sense of foreboding.

 

“Richard Striker,” Philippa proclaimed, raising a hand and making a little flourishing gesture.

 

“You didn’t!” Daniela groaned. “ _Pippa._ ”

 

“What?” Philippa sent her friend an innocently questioning look.

 

“You are the silliest girl I know,” was all Daniela could say, slowly shaking her head. “Besides, don’t you think it sounds like a foreign name? German, perhaps?”

 

“The king is German,” Philippa observed, pursing up her lips, and Daniela just shook her head again. “Anyway, this is all beside the point. What was I saying? Yes! I sent them to the publisher, and he has replied saying that he would like to publish them.”

 

Lady Daniela gasped, her pretty pink lips falling open in a perfect O.

 

“He didn’t!” she cried. “Oh, Pippa, did he really?”

 

Philippa nodded, her pale eyes dancing with laughter.

 

“You’re going to be a published author,” Daniela whispered in reverent tones. “Just think, your own words printed out in a book for anyone anywhere to read.”

 

“I know!” Philippa exclaimed, but then her bright smile dimmed. “There’s only one difficulty.”

 

“I shan’t allow it,” Daniela said, her brow knitting. “No difficulty is going to come between my friend and her dream. Whatever it is, we will find a way to overcome it.”

 

She was too busy staring thoughtfully ahead to notice the way her friend’s pale cheeks grew pink at her words. 

 

“Oh, but Danni,” — Philippa turned fearful eyes on her — “my father says he can’t afford another London season for me, and if I don’t find some stupid fellow to marry me by the end of this one, I’ll have to go back to the country and rot away all alone at Smallbrook and probably die a lonely old spinster.”

 

Daniela could tell that her friend was getting a little carried away imagining the horror of such an ending.

 

“What about that nice Lieutenant Whatsisname?” she asked, hoping to draw Philippa’s mind back to the present moment. “He hasn’t, er, brought his courage to the sticking point, as it were?” Not that she and Philippa were often invited to the same parties — in fact, it was a wonder they had even managed to meet in the first place, what with Daniela being the daughter of a viscount and Philippa…well, Daniela wouldn’t be so unkind as to call her a _nobody_ , but she certainly had to admit _she’d_ never heard of the Lesters of Lancashire before — but Philippa had told her all about how the young lieutenant kept asking her to stand up at dances and had even come to call on a few occasions.

 

“Erm, well,” Philippa mumbled something.

 

“What was that?” Daniela leaned in to try to catch her friend’s soft words. They were just entering the park now, and though it was a fine early spring day, Daniela was surprised to see how few other people were out taking the fresh air.

 

“I said,” Philippa’s voice was barely louder, “I, er, may have turned him down.”

 

“Oh,” Daniela replied. She couldn’t quite blame her friend that, considering she had done the same with several suitors already. Except, Daniela was an heiress who practically had her pick of eligible bachelors, while Philippa was staring down the cold, hard reality of a lifetime of spinsterhood.

 

“It’s just… I tried to imagine it, Danni, being married to him, and being his wife, and oh, it just sounded the most horrid thing I could possibly ever conceive of.” Philippa made a hopeless gesture with her free hand, and Daniela reached up to give her arm a sympathetic pat. 

 

“Sometimes I think…” Philippa began to say but then stopped herself and shook her head. “No. I don’t know what I think, except that I decidedly cannot marry poor Lieutenant Whatsisname.”

 

Daniela couldn’t hold back a peal of laughter at that.

 

“Can’t you remember his name either, Pippa?” she demanded, her voice shaking with mirth.

 

“Oh, of course I can, but saying it makes my skin crawl.” She gave a little shiver and huddled closer to Daniela’s side. “Oh, why did he have to want to marry me so badly? He was such fun to talk to, until he started spouting all that nonsense about how my eyes were like sapphires and my teeth were like pearls.”

 

“Sounds like you would make a lovely brooch,” Daniela observed.

 

“Oh, hush, you,” Philippa said and gave her arm a playful swat. “Sometimes I wish I could just run away somewhere. Jamaica, maybe. Or Australia.” She gazed up at the elm branches stretching above them, already sprouting their first leaves of the year.

 

“How about India? I’ve always dreamed of visiting there,” Daniela added, joining her friend in the game of Let’s Pretend.

 

“All right, India then,” Philippa assented. “And we would buy a plot of land and build our own house, and we would own three dogs and five cats and a couple of elephants.”

 

“What would we do for money, though?” Daniela wondered.

 

“I’ll be a best-selling poet, by then,” Philippa explained. “We’ll live off the royalties from my book sales.”

 

“Will you buy me a pianoforte?” Daniela asked. “I don’t think I could live in a house where I couldn’t play.”

 

“I’ll buy you two!” Philippa exclaimed, her smile growing bright again. “One for upstairs and one for downstairs, so you can play any time the mood strikes.”

 

“I’ll tell you what, Pippa,” Daniela said all of a sudden. “If your father makes you go home to Smallbrook at the end of the season, I’ll invite you to stay with us in Berkshire for the summer. How does that sound?”

 

Philippa was so surprised, she stopped moving entirely, causing both of them to pull up short in the middle of the path.

 

“Would you really do that?” she asked, her voice small and breathless, and Daniela couldn’t miss the rosiness warming her cheeks this time. Her own cheeks began to fill with a corresponding heat.

 

“Of course I would,” she said, tilting her head to one side to peer into her friend’s downcast eyes. “Haven’t I told you, time and time again, that you are my dearest friend in all the world?”

 

“Y-you have,” Philippa said, and the pink of her cheeks deepened to red. “And you’re mine, Danni. The dearest friend I could ever have hoped for.”

 

Then, to Lady Daniela’s surprise, Philippa looked up, glanced around them and, seeing that they were quite alone, leant forward and placed a soft kiss against Daniela’s cheek. She didn’t know quite why, but for some reason the warm pressure of her friend’s lips against her skin sent a strange sort of shiver down through the core of her being. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation. No, if Daniela were honest with herself, she must admit it was most decidedly a pleasurable one.

 

“What was that for?” she whispered.

 

“Because I love you, and you’re wonderful,” Philippa replied, reaching her free hand up to give Daniela’s arm a gentle squeeze. That caress, as well, made Daniela feel a pleasant tingle run across her skin, but even more than that, Pippa’s words were causing her heart to flutter.

 

“Well, I love you too,” she said back. “And I think you’re wonderful too.”

 

Philippa’s face turned bright red, and her eyes sank toward the ground again.

 

“No, Danni. I-I don’t think you understand. What I meant was… I love you.” And her eyes rose slowly to Daniela’s face again, glowing with both fear and hope.

 

Daniela’s eyes seemed fixed to her friend’s face. Why didn’t she seem capable of moving them away? And why should Pippa’s words, her tentative _I love you_ , make Daniela suddenly feel as though she were flying up in the sky, high above where they now stood? She gave herself a little shake and glanced about them. For the moment they were still alone, but that could change at any time. Just behind Philippa, she caught sight of a little alcove, shielded on three sides by tall box hedges, and with a stone bench in the center. She gave Philippa’s arm a tug and made a nodding motion toward the alcove. Philippa turned to see what Daniela was gesturing toward and then, catching on, almost dragged her over to the secluded spot.

 

When they’d sat down on the bench, the stone cold against their thighs, Daniela turned to Philippa and asked her in a whisper,

 

“Did you really mean what you said just now? Did you really mean it?”

 

Philippa was gazing up at her with a look that it slowly dawned on Daniela was one of utter and total adoration.

 

“If an hour from now I burned up in a fire,” Philippa murmured, taking Daniela’s cheeks in her gloved palms, “and my body was reduced to nothing more than smoldering ash, even my cinders would rise on the wind and let themselves be scattered across the earth until some remaining particle of my being could find itself at your side.”

 

“Oh, Pippa,” Daniela sighed, and she leant forward and closed her eyes until her lips found her friend’s and molded themselves against them. She felt the heat shivering across her skin again, running from the point where their lips met and down her neck and through her limbs and her belly and all the way to the tips of her toes.

 

“I don’t want to get married,” Philippa whispered when at last they pulled apart. “I just want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

 

“It’s the same for me, my dear,” Daniela replied, pressing her forehead against the other girl’s. “It’s the same for me.”

 

“But what shall we do?” Philippa asked after a moment, drawing away with a worried expression wrinkling her forehead. “You can’t keep turning down offers of marriage forever.”

 

“Who says I can’t?” Daniela retorted. “What’s the use in being an heiress if I still have to marry some stupid old husband?” For the first time in her life, Daniela was starting to think that perhaps being a Lady wasn’t such a terrible thing after all.

 

“Well, but if you never get married, won’t your father’s title pass to your cousin?” Philippa asked. “You’ll never get to be a viscountess.”

 

“As if I care a fig for that!” Daniela waved a dismissive hand. “All it really is is wearing a little tiara and an ermine cloak in your portrait and getting presented at court and things. Fortunately my wise forebears understood enough not to entail the estate, so even if the title passes to someone else, I’ll still inherit.”

 

“But won’t your parents make you marry?” Philippa asked, and Daniela could see her eyes were still bright with fear. “Mine threatened to lock me in my room without food for a week when they learned I’d turned down Whatsisname.”

 

“Did they now?” Daniela said, her eyes narrowing. “Well, you are most certainly coming to stay with me in Berkshire at the end of the summer. I will make _sure_ of it, and if my parents ever say that I must marry or else they will lock me in my room for a week, you and I really _will_ run away to India.”

 

The corners of Philippa’s lips turned up slowly as Daniela spoke. She reached a hand out and slid it into the other girl’s.

 

“Or Jamaica?” she murmured, her lower lip disappearing between her teeth as she held in a laugh.

 

“Or Australia,” Daniela agreed, giving her friend’s hand a squeeze. “Now, come here and give me another kiss before I have to go and convince my mother that it was her idea to have you come to stay.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published as part of the Phanfic Exchange on tumblr


End file.
